February

The United States Senate passes Resolution 71, urging U.S. President Bill Clinton to "take all necessary and appropriate actions to respond to the threat posed by Iraq's refusal to end its weapons of mass destruction programs".

May

May 8 – CBS telecasts The Wizard of Oz for the last time. Beginning in 1999, The Wizard of Oz will be shown on cable, and in 2002, 2003, 2004, and 2005 it will be telecast by the WB Television Network in addition to its cable showings.

The first euro coins are minted in Pessac, France. Because the final specifications for the coins were not finished in 1998, they will have to be melted and minted again in 1999.

May 13–14 – Riots directed against Chinese Indonesians break out in Indonesia. Indonesian natives destroy and burn Chinese Indonesian-owned properties, however, most of the 1,000 people who died in the riots were the Javanese Indonesian looters who targeted the Chinese shops, not the Chinese themselves, since the looters were burnt to death in a massive fire.[2][3][4][5][6]

May 28 – Nuclear testing: In response to a series of Indian nuclear tests, Pakistan explodes 5 nuclear devices of its own in the Chaghai hills of Baluchistan, codenamed Chagai-I, prompting the United States, Japan and other nations to impose economic sanctions. Pakistan celebrates Youm-e-Takbir annually.

August

Yangtze River Floods: In China the Yangtze river breaks through the main bank; before this, from August 1–5, peripheral levees collapsed consecutively in Jiayu County Baizhou Bay. The death toll exceeds 12,000, with many thousands more injured.

September 10 - At midnight, a shooting occurs aboard an Akula-classnuclear-poweredattack submarine of the Russian Navy docked in the northern Russian port-city of Severomorsk. The shooter, Alexander Kuzminykh, a 19-year-old seaman from St. Petersburg, opened fire after murdering a soldier (who was supervising his detention on punishment charges in the personnel quarters of the submarine) with a chisel, and taking his AK-74Ucarbine. After killing five people and wounding one with the dead soldier's weapon, he proceeded to take 2 fellow soldiers hostage, and barricaded himself in the submarine's torpedo room, where he would later murder them. For 23 hours, doctors, relatives, and a priest attempt to persuade him to surrender, but to no avail. After threatening numerous times to set the torpedo room on fire (an event the authorities feared would cause a quote "second Chernobyl"), the crisis came to an end on the morning of 12 September, when a special anti-terrorist commando unit of the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) launched a raid on the torpedo room during which, Kuzminkykh allegedly committed suicide, contrary to prior reports that he'd been killed by the unit.

November

November 16 – Sesame Workshop (back then known as Children's Television Workshop) launches Elmo's World, the most famous Sesame Street segment, lasting from the late 90's to Sesame Street's 40th anniversary (69-09) and the 10th anniversary of the segment itself (99-09).